


Anachronism

by artenon



Series: RoyEd Week 2017 [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 08:19:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11870331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artenon/pseuds/artenon
Summary: “Who—” Roy cuts off as the man turns to him.He’s the spitting image of Ed, if Ed was about a decade older. But Ed and Al are the only ones of them left, the only ones with the dark skin and distinctly golden hair and eyes marking their Xerxesian descent.The stranger stares at him, crumbs falling from his mouth to the table. “Oh. Hey.”“I—”“Don’t freak out,” he says, “but I’m Edward Elric.”





	Anachronism

**Author's Note:**

> For royed week day 2: time travel! Post-manga/BH with slight divergence in that Ed still has his automail arm and alchemy.
> 
> I actually am not a huge fan of time travel because thinking about logistics and paradoxes makes my head hurt but I DID THIS ANYWAY. Also, as I'm usually a fluff monster I feel I should warn that this fic has a more bittersweet ending.
> 
> Hope you enjoy! <3

It’s the middle of the night, but Roy awakens the moment he hears his front door click open. Being in the military—after everything—

It’s not just Ishval that haunts him. It’s the knowledge that there must still be people in the military who think he’s a traitor, who want him dead, who would reverse all the progress he’s fought tooth and nail to make if they were given half the chance. The knowledge that things like homunculi exist—have existed, could exist again.

Sometimes Riza calls him in the dead of night, and she is so strong and has been through so much but there are still nights when she’s scared of the shadows.

She’s not the only one.

Roy slits his eyes open, reaches for the gloves under his pillow and slips them on. There’s a gun in the drawer of his nightstand. He used to keep that under his pillow, too, but, well.

The nightmares can be really bad sometimes.

He forsakes the gun and rolls off the bed, quiet as a breath, the balls of his feet pressing lightly against the hardwood floor.

He tiptoes to the bedroom door, listening to the inconspicuous creaks as the intruder walks through the house; it’s like they’re not even trying to hide. Cabinets opening and closing, the clatter of silverware as the drawer slams shut. What are they looking for in the kitchen?

Roy’s pace quickens alongside his breath. He readies his fingers to start a spark.

Light is pouring out of the kitchen. He rounds the darkened hallway and raises his hand, thumb rubbing against his middle finger—

The stranger in his house has a familiar sheen of golden hair. He is also seated at the kitchen table like he belongs there, all slouched and casual, and is cramming a piece of bread loaded with peanut butter into his mouth.

“Who—” Roy cuts off as the man turns to him.

He’s the spitting image of Ed, if Ed was about a decade older. But Ed and Al are the only ones of them left, the only ones with the dark skin and distinctly golden hair and eyes marking their Xerxesian descent.

The stranger stares at him, crumbs falling from his mouth to the table. “Oh. Hey.”

“I—”

“Don’t freak out,” he says, “but I’m Edward Elric.”

Roy does not freak out, but he does go a little lightheaded. He staggers a little, grips the nearest chair for balance. Edward—or the man who claims to be him—looks concerned, openly. That’s different, and a point against this person actually being who he says he is. Usually Ed hides his concern behind anger, yelling this or that about how someone needs to take better care of themselves, or should know better, or had better not die or else he’d break the laws of alchemy just to bring them back so he could kill them again himself. Maybe Alphonse sees this side of Ed, this vulnerability, but Roy doesn’t.

“Look, it’s a lot to explain. I’m figuring stuff out as I go, too. Are you okay?”

“Who are you,” Roy manages, “and what are you doing in my house?”

“I told you, I’m Ed,” he says. He crams the rest of the bread into his mouth and barely chews before he swallows.

He’s going to choke one day if he keeps that up. Roy says so out loud.

“Yeah, you tell me that.” He rolls his eyes. “And it doesn’t count as breaking in if you live here, jackass.”

“Pardon?”

He stiffens abruptly. “Uh, how old are you?”

“Thirty-six. And I haven’t seen Edward Elric in over five years, but you’re definitely too old to be him.”

“Yeaaaah,” he says, fiddling with something around his neck. Roy looks closer. It’s a necklace of plain black string, presumably with something attached to the end, but it disappears under his collar so Roy can’t see what it is. Ed rubs the string between his forefinger and thumb. “So, I figured this when I saw your face, but I’m from the future.”

It’s the only answer that makes sense, but Roy still can’t believe it. He sinks into the chair he’d been holding onto.

“I just didn’t realize I’d come…so far back.”

Roy has so many questions, but first— “I need proof that you’re actually Edward Elric.”

He scrunches his face. “Ugh, okay.”

Silence stretches between them as he thinks, and Roy takes a good look at him. If he is Ed, then he’s aged well. His jaw is squarer, his shoulders broader. His hair is gathered into a ponytail that falls farther down his back than he usually keeps it. Roy wonders if he’s keeping it longer now on purpose, or if he just hasn’t gotten around to cutting it in a while. There are lines under his eyes, slight. He looks tired, but not like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his back anymore, and that makes something in Roy relax.

Roy last saw Ed a few months after the Promised Day, after Al had recuperated enough to make the trip back to Resembool. He saw Alphonse once after, when he dropped by Central to make his farewells before heading back east for his next adventure, but after Ed handed in his resignation papers, it seemed he wanted nothing more to do with the military or anyone involved.

Roy didn’t blame him, still doesn’t, but that hasn’t stopped him from hoping that he and his team might be an exception to Ed’s disdain.

“Well?” Roy asks.

He says, “I owe you five-twenty cenz.”

And that right there—

No one else knows it, no one else was there besides Al. Even if someone else knew that Ed owed him some cenz, they wouldn’t remember it, because they wouldn’t understand it. A pocket change loan, but it was Ed’s way of begging, asking, demanding that Roy stay alive. Ed’s way of showing, because he didn’t know how else to say it, that he cared.

 “Fine,” Roy says. “You’ve convinced me. How old are you? Why are you here?” He pauses. “And what did you mean, you live here?”

Ed laces his fingers together in front of him, flesh and steel interlinking. “So, I’m twenty-nine. And I was kidding about living here. You let me crash here when I’m in Central so I don’t have to pay for a hotel. That’s why I have a key.”

Roy is not surprised at himself, or his future self, for making such an offer, but he is surprised that Ed would accept it. He doesn’t say that, though. “How did you end up here?”

“Okay, so.” Ed hunches forward, staring intensely at Roy. “We’ve been tracking this rogue alchemist, right? And this guy’s been performing human transmutation using a Philosopher’s Stone—”

“There are still Stones being made?”

“Just because there are no more homunculi doesn’t mean there are no more monsters. You of all people should know that, General.”

He doesn’t like the bite in Ed’s voice as he says the rank, like it’s a vile thing.

Wait.

“You said _we’ve_ been tracking this rogue alchemist. Are you still involved with the military?”

Ed hesitates, then shrugs, slow and exaggerated. “I’m not above doing favors for an old friend. Especially if it’s about human transmutation. I mean, I’m sort of one of the few experts left who isn’t dead or evil.

“Anyway, there’s been, like…disappearances. Some pretty high-profile alchemists. And we do some digging, find out there’s a Stone involved. We, um, find the warehouse he’s been using and go to confront him, except there’s a transmutation circle on the floor, and he gets me. And it’s—I don’t know how he did this, but when he sent me through the Gate, I went through like I have before but then it threw me out…here. Back in time, I mean.”

“And so, you decided to break into my house and eat my bread.”

“Again, not breaking in if you gave me a key. And it wasn’t ass o’ clock when—when I left, so I thought I’d only been gone for a few hours. I didn’t realize I’d actually gone back in time until I saw you and realized you didn’t have enough gray hairs.”

Roy sputters. “I do not—I don’t have gray hairs! Do I have gray hairs in the future?”

The look Ed gives him is pitying. “Roy, you’re forty-three years old in my time. You have gray hairs. A lot of them.”

“You wound me, Edward.” Roy slumps in his seat, exaggerating the movement to cover the fact that he’s thrown by Ed’s use of his first name. Even most of his friends call him Mustang off the clock. He wonders when Ed started calling him _Roy_.

Ed snickers at Roy’s dramatics but sobers quickly, as if remembering the gravity of the situation. “Well anyway, that’s about all I got for you.”

Roy scratches his head. This was all way beyond his knowledge as an alchemist. “Do you have any idea how we could get you back to your time? Maybe we could work with the transmutation circle that was used to send you here?”

“I couldn’t really get a look at the bastard’s circle before I got taken by the Gate, and even if we somehow tracked the guy down from here, who knows how helpful research that’s almost a decade old will be? We’re kind of at a dead end here.”

“You said yourself you’re the expert on human transmutation,” Roy says. “If you can’t crack it, I’m not sure who can.”

Ed stills. “If we can’t, I bet Al can.”

“I haven’t seen your brother in years, either. You two didn’t exactly leave me with any way to get in touch with you.”

He tries not to sound bitter. He really does. But—God, he’s missed them. They’re both brilliant and kind and amazing and despite Roy’s ever-busy life and all the work he’s been doing to repair relations with Ishval, his life feels so much quieter without Ed in it. He’d thought, after knowing Ed for all those years he’d been a State Alchemist, that life would be peaceful without him. The reality is that it’s dull.

“Sorry,” Ed says, quiet. “We didn’t mean to leave everyone behind. We just needed to…go, for a while. Experience the world in a way we never got to before.”

“When do you come back?” Roy can’t help but ask, though his chest aches in fear of the response. The Ed before him is twenty-nine. The Ed in Roy’s time should be twenty-two now. How many—or how few—times will Roy see him between those years?

“Not to presume you stay,” he says, a messy attempt to backtrack, make the answer seem less important to him than it is. “I’m sure you’re always on the go. But, when do I see you again?”

Ed ducks his head and toys with his necklace. “Next year,” he says. “I’ll be back in Central next year, for…a while. I mean, like. I still travel around doing shit. But yeah. I settle down, kind of.”

“Oh,” Roy says, and wonders why the tension isn’t leaving him. Objectively the answer should make him happy, but something seems off about it.

“Anyway.” Ed clears his throat. “I don’t know where Al is now, either. We were both moving around a lot at this time. But I know where he’ll be later. And I know exactly where he’ll be in my time.”

“You know where Al will be seven years from now,” Roy says. “How does that help, exactly?”

“I’m gonna send a letter to him in the future, and he’ll be able to go with you to look at the transmutation circle, maybe figure out how to reverse it. I mean, you’ll probably get him to look at the circle anyway, but this way at least you guys will know what happened. That’ll help a lot.”

“Slow down, Ed. How are you going to send a letter to the future?”

“I’ll just drop it in your mailbox with a note to the postman to deliver it in seven years.”

“And you think they’d follow such an absurd request?”

“You gotta have faith in people sometimes, Roy.”

“Fine,” Roy says. “Assuming they don’t throw the letter away because they think you to be a madman, I still don’t understand—”

“How it’ll get to Al? Yeah, okay. So. This is a theory, but time is like…” Ed’s face pinches, and he waves his hand vaguely in front of him. “Say all points of time exist simultaneously. But not in a ‘everything is predetermined’ way. ‘Cause I’m here, see? So, I write a letter now to be delivered in the future. But to Al in the future, Al in my time, that’s his present. So as soon as I write it—well, maybe when I let go of it, put it in the mailbox, really seal the deal, you know, because I’m the catalyst here, I’m the thing that’s out of place in time, which is why nothing’s happening the moment I had the intention of writing the letter—”

“Ed, you’re rambling.”

“Oh, right. So Al in the future gets the letter and figures out how to reverse the transmutation. And he does it and brings me back. This happens seven years from now but it’s the present for him, and so it affects me, right here, right away. ‘Cause you can look at time as a series of moments proceeding linearly, but if you look at it from another angle, those points are parallel, see?”

Roy does not see. He has about a hundred questions about the logistics of this, but if Ed thinks he has a solution then they might as well try it, so he just says, “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Yeah, that’s a good way to approach situations with me,” Ed says. “Now get me some paper and a pen.”

 

They run into a problem fast.

“I don’t actually know what the date was when I left,” Ed says.

“What do you mean, you don’t know,” Roy says, but he has a sinking feeling he knows the answer. Ed has a remarkable ability to shut everything else out when he has a textbook in front of him. Remarkable and, at times, incredibly frustrating.

“I was researching! A lot! I lost track of the date.” Ed chews on the end of his pen. “But I know what month it is. I guess I can just have it sent on the first.”

Ed nods to himself, and starts writing.

Roy, at a loss for what else to do, waits. Watches. Ed writes—scribbles, really—fast and barely legibly. Roy has seen his mission reports, his research notes. He charges forward in his writing, as with everything, crossing out words and entire sentences at times, figuring out how to better word his thoughts as he goes.

“How are things in the future?” Roy asks. “I mean…how are you? How am I?”

Ed glances sidelong at him, his hand never stopping. Roy wonders if Ed had to learn to be left-handed after he lost his right. He’s never thought to ask. He’s always thought that he knows Ed pretty well, but in hindsight they’ve never really _talked_. The Ed in the kitchen with him could almost be a stranger and that could be because of the missing years between them, but then again, could Roy ever claim a closeness to the Ed of his own time? Is he utterly unjustified in and even ridiculous for missing him or wistfully hoping that wherever he is, he’s at least safe and happy?

“I’m not sure how much I should say,” Ed says. “I don’t wanna, like, fuck up the timeline or anything, you know?”

“Really?” Roy asks. “Nothing you’d change if you could?”

Maes is an old hurt now but sometimes Roy is seized by a sadness and longing so sharp that he can’t help the thought: _I’d do anything if I could just—_

“Nah,” Ed says, surprising him. “Things are actually…kinda nice.”

Roy is quiet for a minute while Ed writes.

After Ed flips the page over and starts on the back, Roy says, “Sometimes it’s hard to convince myself that it’s worth it.”

It’s an admission he hasn’t said out loud before. He knows he must always show his resolve to his team because they’re trusting him, believing in him. But progress can seem so slow, his efforts so fruitless.

Ed’s stopped writing.

“I know it can be tough,” Ed says, carefully, like he’s actually thinking before he speaks. Roy half-expected him to start yelling, slap some sense into him. “You don’t have the benefit of hindsight like I do, but, Roy, it’s worth it. I mean, you still have a ton of shit you want to do, I don’t think that’ll ever change. But things are better. Good, even. I think…you’re happy.” Softly, he adds, “I hope you are.”

What does that mean? Roy wants to ask, but Ed’s jaw tightens, and he turns back to his letter, shoulders stiff. The atmosphere in the room has shifted, but Roy isn’t sure how or why. But he has a pressing need to get out of it, out of the heaviness in the air around Ed.

He leaves, just long enough to get a stamp and envelope, and he sets them wordlessly by Ed’s elbow. Ed grunts in acknowledgment but doesn’t look or speak until he’s signed the letter with a flourish, and then he sits back in his chair.

“There.” He folds the letter and slips it into the envelope. “I’ll just put a note on the envelope for when to send it.”

“So, am I to assume you’ll be whisked off back to your time after we put this in my mailbox?” Roy asks.

Ed stands up, sealed envelope in hand. “If my theory holds. Otherwise, I might be stuck here for a _long_ time.”

Roy leads the way out of his house. “We’ll hope for the best.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, opening the mailbox. “Right.”

Ed hesitates, staring into the mailbox. His free hand plays with the string of his necklace, and Roy can see the tremble of the hand holding the letter suspended in the mailbox.

“Ed?”

“You know,” he says, “there is another possibility. A much more likely one.”

“What are you talking about?”

Ed inhales slowly. Exhales. He drops the letter and slams the mailbox shut.

Almost immediately, pitch blackness floods Ed’s torso before splitting open into an eye.

The Gate.

“Are you going back to your time?”

Ed looks down at himself. “I don’t think I’m going anywhere. I think I’m just…going.”

“What—”

“Knowing Al,” Ed says, voice a carefully-modulated blank, “he read the letter and went to you. And knowing the both of you, you decided that instead of waiting for me to be sent back to the past and finding a way to reverse it, you would just stop the event from happening altogether.”

Black tendrils curl around Ed’s legs.

“Ed, what are you saying?”

Ed looks at him.

“If you stopped it from ever happening, then the timeline changed. I won’t exist anymore.”

Something lurches in Roy’s stomach, something cold and awful.

“Don’t worry,” Ed says. “Edward Elric will still exist. Just not…this particular one.”

“Ed…”

“It’s the safer option, really,” he continues. “You shouldn’t fuck with the Gate. Who knows if you guys would’ve been able to bring me back? This was the best solution. It’s what I would do.”

He smiles at Roy, but it cracks in seconds.

Ed’s legs crumble away, starting from his feet and climbing up to his knees, his thighs. Roy has a visceral flashback of what it was like to be dragged through the Gate on the Promised Day, to be torn apart and put back together again. But if Ed is right, then he won’t be put back anywhere. The Gate will shatter him into nothingness.

For a second, Roy can’t breathe.

“Roy,” Ed says. “I’m fucking terrified, actually.”

The words feel like a request, or maybe permission, and Roy hugs him immediately. He’s too scared to hold tight, too scared that he might feel Ed disintegrating in his arms. Ed clings to his back.

“It’ll be okay,” Roy says helplessly into his hair.

“Yeah. I’m just disappearing from the fabric of existence. No big deal.”

“Ed.”

“Fuck,” Ed says. He pushes back, far enough that he can look Roy in the eye. “This contradicts everything I said about not wanting to fuck up the timeline by giving you too much information, but I just—I need—can I—”

“God forbid you be selfish in your last moments,” Roy says, though Ed is hardly making sense to him. “What is it, Edward? Anything.”

With a choked noise, Ed surges forward and kisses him, flesh and steel fingers digging into Roy’s arms hard enough to bruise.

Roy gasps, then leans into it immediately. Ed kisses like he’s drowning, hard and desperate, and he pushes his tongue in without ceremony. It is not exactly pleasant, but it is infectious, and Roy first gives into it and then pushes back, wanting to give everything he’s able in the seconds he has.

When they part, Ed is gone up to his stomach.

Ed exhales raggedly, then reaches into his shirt and tugs his necklace off. When he opens his palm, Roy can see what’s attached to the black string. It’s a golden ring.

“Doesn’t really stay on my automail. Take it,” he says. “To remember me by, or whatever. Maybe even give it to me someday, although then you’d have to explain why it’s all old and scratched and not brand new.”

Roy takes the ring as Ed’s hand crumbles away into ash. The blackness of the Gate curls around Ed’s neck. Roy imagines he can feel it constricting his own.

“Roy, just—” Only Ed’s head is left, suspended in front of him. “When you see me, the me from your time, be patient with me, okay?”

“I will, Ed.”

Ed gives him one last trembling smile. “See you soon.”

And then he’s gone.

Roy’s palm tingles, and he looks down to see the ring and the string disintegrating too, first into ash, then into nothing.

As if Ed was never here at all. As if he never existed.

Roy licks his lips, rubs the finger-sized bruises on his arms, more prominent on the left than the right.

Only almost as if he never existed.

Roy looks to where Ed was just standing. The wind stirs up dead leaves on the lawn, but besides that, the space is empty. “See you soon.”

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, my gf drew some [AMAZING ART](http://foldedstars.tumblr.com/post/164452293503) to accompany this so go check it out and give her some love. :')
> 
> Thank you for reading!!


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